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From
Scotland With Love
Julie
Henry, psychology lecturer
by
Ben Callegari
Growing
up in a tiny school on an island in the far north east of
Scotland called Shetland
– total population only 23,000, Dr Julie Henry has travelled
a long way to discover her career as a psychological researcher.
At school, my favourite subjects were English
and Biology. I suspect my favourite subject would have been
psychology, had this been available, but this simply wasn’t
an option at the School I attended. I don’t honestly know
exactly what made me choose psychology as a career – but I
have never regretted this decision.
My name is Dr Julie Henry, and I’m a lecturer
of Psychology at the University of New South Wales (UNSW),
Australia. My main interest is a special type of psychology
called neuropsychology. In essence, neuropsychology is a type
of psychology in which we make inferences about underlying
brain structures on the basis of patterns of behaviour. Neuropsychology
is a very broad area, but I am particularly interested in
the relationship between emotional
regulation and cognitive control, and identifying the
underlying brain structures that subserve these processes.
My Day in Science
April 12th was a fairly usual day for me. I started the day
replying to e-mails. I then tried to tidy up some matters
that were outstanding, such as finalising an ethics application,
and making further changes to a manuscript I was preparing
to submit to a journal.
Between 1 and 2pm, I gave my final lecture for the 3rd year
undergraduate course Personality and Individual Differences.
Finally, in the afternoon I met with two of my Clinical Masters
students to try and further refine their research projects;
this was probably the highlight of my day as I have some fantastic
students this year and they are all without exception doing
really interesting projects. Most of these research projects
are focused on understanding how emotional and cognitive control
is affected by clinical disorders, such as schizophrenia.
In particular, we are interested in understanding whether
executive deficits (such as problems with planning, inhibition
and mental flexibility) may give rise to problems with socio-emotional
functioning (dealing with emotions that arise from social
environments) via the mechanism of poor emotion regulation.
In terms of where this day’s activity fits into my job and
career path, much of the day was focused on research (preparing
a manuscript for publication, finalizing an ethics application,
and helping my students finalize their own research projects).
Since the main reason I pursued an academic career was to
pursue research,
this day fit well into my overall career path.
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